DWill wrote:Right, my reaction, too, is pretty much the shrug, because people do have different things they like. That's why I thought the Roman maxim was helpful in setting down that basic truth.
Well, you know what they say about great minds.
DWill wrote:Having thought about the maxim, I realize that often people capture it by saying, "There's no accounting for taste," with a disapproving shake of the head, signalling that what the other party likes isn't worthy. I hope you didn't get that flavor from my use of it.
No, no, you were clear and the context, as you suggest, is primed for people to express themselves honestly without fear of someone reading malevolence into it.
DWill wrote:My hunch is that it's the social contact and the shared experience and ritual that most benefits people. These are I think the important comforts, more important than the reassurances that death isn't the disaster we fear it to be, or that by the death of a man we are saved.
I definitely agree. Unfortunately a lot of churches are still about impressing other people, and that can be a toxic experience, especially for those with some fragility already. But with a little screening, the human warmth should be very helpful. And in my experience, the doctrine is no more important to the average Christian than who wins the Super Bowl.
DWill wrote:I can't do what you and Robert can: translate the literal beliefs into ones more metaphorical. I didn't want to be a scoffer or to hold myself out as having a different take, so I thought it best to leave.
That's kind of what I wanted to think about. First off, I consider it normal. Humans come in many flavors, and "pragmatic" or "feet on the ground" (or whatever you choose to call it) is likely to be an important flavor. Among the people I hang around with, most of whom have at least an undergraduate college degree, I would say your outlook is more common by far than any interest in finding meaning in the metaphorical.
Second, in the literary example I have a sort of useful analogy for how that outlook works, without all the baggage of politics, self-righteousness, judgmentalism and the rest that religion often wears like garlic to keep the undead away.
So the common factor with the reaction to this kind of story seems to be finding certain kinds of unreality to be unpalatable. Whereas I tend to find them intriguing . . . "what would that be like?" and later, "why would someone think to tell a story like that?"
DWill wrote:"Certain kinds of unreality" is a criterion that I'd apply to this story. I seem to be a minority, because all the reactions to it that I looked up were positive.
I think there is a continuum for people's reactions to "signs of unrealism". I am actually fairly easily triggered by, for example, movie science fiction that gets the science all wrong. What was that silly movie about falling through a black hole and, intact on the other side, being able to communicate with the past? Unh-unh. Not buying it. Well, I was kind of intrigued by the cute little tie-backs to the stuff from earlier in the movie. A variation on what makes "The Sting" such a fun movie. But the conceit in Doerr's story didn't set off those buzzers for me. More of that in a minute.
DWill wrote: But this particular stab at magical realism just doesn't make it for me. The execution is fatally flawed in my view. Not only does the premise seem preposterous, but the writer gets the "realism" wrong, too. That starts when he tells us that it didn't get above 15 below in Idaho one December. Several other instances of fablism follow in the supposedly naturalistic details.
That strikes me as a realistic reaction, but honestly I didn't pick up on the unrealistic extremes. I mean, okay, some stuff (like the starvation in the extreme winter) was piled on pretty heavily, and he never quite said why the meat was sitting out where the coyotes could get it once they got into the basement, but something else was going on for me. Doerr was being coy about whether her visions were really at all supernatural, up until the guy went off the bridge. And by that time I was already hooked by the relationship to the writer's craft, so I had stopped really caring if the visions were mystically valid or just imagination.
DWill wrote:Other complaints: the hunter stalks his 15-year-old for three years before whisking her off to his cabin, she having reached the age of consent (mildly unsettling).
Yeah, I found her age unnecessarily twisted and still can't understand what role it played, unless it was to give an excuse for him to be so patient and persistent without them actually getting hitched.
DWill wrote:The wife develops a thing for hocus-pocus magic, reading dozens of ancient books on Medieval necromancy or whatever. Why? She already has her powers. Are the books going to teach her something more about her craft?
Since I was reading it as a representation of the writer's craft, it seemed very natural that she would explore mystical stuff. I mean, "Writing Down the Bones" is probably the most recommended book on how to be a writer, and it is mostly about depth psychology and how to let go of inhibitions and let creativity flow. Some parts are deliberately illogical, though none of it dabbles in the supernatural.
DWill wrote:I realize I shouldn't expect merely good writers to be up to Joyce, Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf when it comes to the topic that so grabs our attention: death. So maybe I should lighten up about it a little bit. But I find the climax of the story to be disappointing, consisting of pseudo-profundities.
I did not get the feeling that Doerr was trying to get across any particular profundity about people's desire to connect with dead loved ones, except maybe that even the most educated feel it. Rather I sensed a kind of strange comparison going on, suggesting that the writer's connection to people's dreams would reach even beyond death. Since I think something like that is going on with Jesus, where people imagine what Jesus would be like and a bond is formed from that, I took it pretty seriously as an exploration about what makes the act of writing really matter. I don't know if you saw Disney's "Coco" but it plays with the same material: the memory of the dead within the lives of the living "keeps the dead one alive" so to speak.
DWill wrote:And I never feel the other thing that Doer intends us feel by the end, the holiness of the bond between the hunter and his wife. Where does love truly figure in this story?
It is very common for a married couple to go on for decades with a kind of unspoken agreement not to mention elephants in the room. The thing is, if they are not totally bound in fear, they still work on the stuff internally. They turn it over in their minds, and let it go on being unspoken since they can't see a way to get over the barrier. There is a kind of genuine, if not very romantic, love in that endurance.
As I have been thinking about the husband's decision to at last accept the invitation and go see what she is doing, it felt to me like he had made a kind of breakthrough, that he was going to at least give it a fair chance to be something real. Remembering that I was reading it as the exercise of imagination by a creative person, by that point, as a sort of Jungian encounter with the collective unconscious, I found that to be a really courageous step on the husband's part. (Whether it was motivated by love I am not sure, but he clearly still cared about her.)
Imagine your favorite auto mechanic, pragmatic to the bone and having lots of good jokes to tell, but never giving a fig for music, and his wife the cellist whom he has been unable to make sense of for decades invites him to see her in a concert. And then he gets it: he still doesn't know a thing about counterpoint or chord changes, but he hears her passion, and sees her connection with the audience, and suddenly it isn't just a performance but an engagement with what life is about. Before that, he didn't really have any concept that life might be "about" anything, but his wife did, and he wanted to give it a chance.